Making Babies Read online

  All this by way of explaining why I was put on my side on the birthing bed. The midwives are totally clued in – they ask do I have a belt, or a frame – by which, I realise with a shock, they mean ‘Zimmer frame’. One says that the latest medical study claims that pelvic problems like mine don’t exist. Later, another says, ‘We send them out of here on crutches all the time.’ So why have I never heard of this before? It seems that, even now, there is a distance between what women say about themselves (I am in pain), and the degree to which this is seen as relevant (Ah, yes. Pain). But why should I be annoyed, when the one who denies it most is me?

  Suffer on.

  Oh, all right then.

  The body forgets. The pains of this pregnancy, like the pains of the last, will wash through me like water. What I will always remember, though, what I can’t forget, is the way people seemed to enjoy it – my joyful suffering – some of them in a kind way, and some in a way that was quite vicious. In the old days, it was women – the mad midwife who says to a labouring woman, ‘Now you’re paying for your five minutes of pleasure, cackle, cackle.’ Or the mad matron who wouldn’t let a friend take a cushion into the hospital church after the birth of her son. All the demented Catholic bitches fretting at their crochet blankets in the old people’s homes, shouting, ‘It serves you right!’ and ‘Filth! filth!’ at the Latvian girl who comes in to hoover the floor. But the people who enjoyed my pain, in 2003, were men – very few, it has to be said, but it only takes one to ruin your day. The occasional drunken rant or sober sneering to tell me that I was weak, now. To remind me that, pregnant, I was a woman in the abstract, a slow-motion explosion of flesh and sexual anxiety, God help me, when all I was doing was trying to walk from one side of the room to the other.

  The statistic you hear bandied about is that one in six women is abused during pregnancy. I assume this means ‘hit’.

  They are trying to call us back to the world, perhaps. They forget, as the pregnant woman forgets, that all this will end. Pregnancy is something that passes through your body. It is not about you, or even about itself. It is just a baby; endlessly, slowly, painfully, making its way out into the world.

  The baby. The baby. Because of all this pelvis nonsense, I haven’t had time to fall in love with the baby. And there is something in me now that is afraid of my own bones, that whispers, ‘You will never walk again.’ Maybe this is why the pushing doesn’t go so well.

  ‘Push!’

  Everything looks like a home video in which some shots are endless, for no reason at all, and then it jumps to something else.

  ‘Push!’

  I pop a few blood vessels, apparently. Tiny ones, under my chin.

  ‘Push.’

  I do what they tell me. And then I don’t want to do it any more. It is not a question of the pain. I don’t think I am in pain – or at least, I am not sure. The room is quite ordinary, the people quite usual and nice, but I know something now that I never wanted to know. I know that the body is tough, and difficult, and that it can be broken. I know that when it is broken there is nothing left of you. This isn’t so much a knowledge as a place and, afterwards, I do not want to go there again. If I do, I will recognise it, and know I am about to die, in the ordinary way that people do. What a sickener. Martin looks down at me – just a glance. And we go on.

  ‘But did it hurt, though, Mam? Did it?’

  ‘Ah,’ says my mother, who did all of this in the days before epidurals. ‘But wasn’t it worth it?’

  He is in the pram beside me now, sucking on his fingers, getting written about. Poor fella. His eyes have a gentle, mischievous look to them. ‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ he says. Quite right. Two days ago, he discovered he could grasp things and he spent the rest of the day crying for the world: the pattern on the duvet that he could not pick up, his mother’s hair that hung within reach and then was gone. He did not sleep for eleven hours – everything he saw, now, was something he might touch and hold. It’s an exciting life.

  It is exciting, having him around. The most surprising thing is the way that the love repeats as much as the pain – you would think there could not be enough space for it, and then, creak, another room opens in your heart, huge, full of interest and light. My beautiful boy. No, really – he came out handsome. I didn’t see his first breath but I saw him when they held him up, a proper baby; grown up already, fat like a cherub and kicking against open air.

  I have a baby the size of Marlon Brando.

  ‘Hello.’

  They lift him up high and already he looks so far away from me. A boy; I knew he would be a boy (I just did). I reach out and he is laid on my stomach, which sags terrifically to receive him. He does not stop crying, but he is not crying very hard. He takes his own time about things. He sorts himself out. I have the strongest feeling that he is his own person – a person I don’t know yet, and may never actually know. This is the thrill of separation, and there is bleakness to it, too.

  Someone new.

  Then I lift him to my breast. How funny . . . I can’t remember how to feed these things.

  And the next night, when I still haven’t got the hang of it, the night nurse whisks him off to produce an adult belch from somewhere (maybe she did it herself) and I think, ‘Oh, Christ, wind. How could I forget about wind?’ And some days later again, the same, stony-faced argument over the car seat – what origami do you do with the seat-belt, back or front, and facing which way? – as there was when his sister was born, and I stood on the side of the same road with a newborn baby in my arms.

  And I know what the edge in my mother’s voice was – it was wonder. An appalled sort of wonder. You forget. How can your mind let you down like that? How can you be such an amnesiac as to repeat the experience, as she did, four more times? The most important and intense moments of your life, the emotion-sodden weeks and months of nursing a new person into the world, wiped, gone; locked in some part of your mind to which you have no access. Where is it written – in your bones? Certainly not in the flesh, because flesh grows again, this is the mystery of it, everything springs back into (roughly) the right place; your bruised soft tissue plumps up again, and the cells that contain the secret of your last baby give way to cells that are indifferent and ready; perhaps even mildly disposed towards Doing It All Again.

  When the baby is a month old – he is so gorgeous – I come, momentously, to a decision. I can’t help it. I just have to say it. Of course I should bide my time, I should wait a month, or more: I should be canny about this thing, because this is an argument I feel I must win – but I end up blurting it out instead.

  I say, ‘I really think we should have another one. I really do.’

  And Martin says, ‘I am trying to drive the car.’

  Science

  I REMEMBER READING once that women have a thing in their brains, A Deep Thing, like a radar, that checks every forty-five seconds for the sound of a baby’s cry. Whether you know it or not. Whether, even, you have a baby or not. And this, they say, is one of the reasons that women get up in the middle of the night to tend to crying babies.

  So what’s wrong with me?

  I sleep. At least some nights I do. I sleep until the crying gets loud enough to wake me – as loud as the sound of a breaking cup, for example; slightly louder than the sound of the phone in another room (which doesn’t wake me either). Martin gets up and brings the baby to me, and when Martin isn’t there – well, there is no telling, really, how long that poor child might cry. I love my baby, but I am not a proper woman, neurologically speaking, or I have an override system, or the scientists who discovered the Deep Female Caring Thing in the Middle of Your Brain in the Middle of the Night were talking bollocks.

  My life is littered with this stuff: a rubbish of studies and statistics about men, women, babies, cleaning fluids, neurologies, fatty acids, and what we are really like, and not one of them with a mental footnote to say where they came from – who studied what in order to decide them, and would
you give them the time of day if they were sat beside you in the pub. They’ll give people money to study anything these days: gender science, media science, why people in the Western world are mildly irritated with each other all the time now, why men earn more.

  For example: there is a study that shows that men have a better grasp of three-dimensional space than women – and this is why they are better at reading maps. The scientists discovered this by scanning people’s brains while they played certain computer games. Now, it may be that men are just better at computer games than women, or it may be that they have wasted more of their life playing computer games. Or it may, quite simply, be true. But what I want to know is, if men are so good at three-dimensional space, why can they never find anything around the house?

  I’d love to have a brain scan. There’s your head, like an electric cauliflower, all lit up in contours of red and orange and green. There is your brain all pulsing as you think of – well, who is to say what is going on in there. Don’t tell the scientists, at any rate. Apparently, women’s brains have a bigger – but much bigger – area for the emotion we call ‘sad’. The scientists showed them ‘sad things’ and watched their brains flare. The report didn’t say what the sad things were.

  That is the problem with science. It never tells you the most important thing.

  Here are some arbitrary facts. Men who do more about the house ‘get’ (as they say) more sex from their female partners. In homes where both partners are working full-time, women do the bulk of the housework, but the higher the status of the woman’s job, the more work she does at home. (No sex there, so. Nice clean bathroom for you. Occasional holiday in the Caribbean. Fair enough.) People who look after children are more intelligent than people who do not (we knew that already). A child’s impulse control depends on the amount of ‘face time’ it gets from its mother in the first eight months (read that and weep, girls). One-third of boys reared by single fathers in Britain end up in prison. Fifty-five per cent of Irish couples need both salaries to repay their mortgage. The number of Filipinas working as domestics in the southern suburbs of Dublin is a lot more than you think.

  What single thing would most improve the quality of your life?

  If my husband unballed his socks before they solidified in the laundry basket, that is the thing that would improve my life the most. If he afforded me and my labour that much respect.

  Then again, he does the dishes. Even my porridge bowl. Even the scrambled eggs.

  Every couple you meet is in an advanced stage of negotiation, whether they have children or not. You can spend weeks talking about who should be responsible for buying new light bulbs. You can spend your life talking about it, because when you talk about new light bulbs you are talking about everything. You are talking about how you were reared, and how you love, and how you are valued. Every light bulb is a triumph of diplomacy. It takes years to buy one. Marriage is like Churchill and Stalin breaking off, at Yalta, for a quick shag. Oh, all right then, you take Poland.

  Meanwhile . . . I sit at my lovely desk, typing, while my lovely husband sits next door rocking my lovely baby with his foot and reading the newspaper. We are the most fortunate people that history has ever made. And I think that we will be devoured by plague and by fire, that the sea will rise up to drown us, and the bombs fall on us, and the food rot on our table. And still, clickety clickety click; rock, rock, rock. It is a lovely day, the sun pours through a window that is clean enough, the new baby is quiet and very bonny, his sister is at the crèche, which we can afford, just about, and no one has to be anything, just for now, just for a while.

  Apparently, pregnant women aren’t as stupid as they think they are. A team of psychologists from the University of Sunderland found that, although many subscribed to the popular view that pregnancy affects your memory and concentration, a series of mental tests showed they actually performed no worse than women who were not carrying a child. Dr Ros Crawley, who headed up the study, said, ‘Even though the performance of the two groups did not differ on the cognitive tests, the pregnant women strongly felt that their memory and attention was worse than before they became pregnant.’

  So pregnant women are stupid for thinking that they are stupid when they are, in fact, not stupid at all.

  Another test says that pregnant women lose ten points off their IQ. I was actually pregnant when I read about this – I forget where, but I was so concerned I went and did an IQ test. I can’t remember what the results were. I think they were all right. Maybe I lost the page. Or maybe I just didn’t finish the damn thing. I can’t remember what happened after that. Oh, I know – I had a baby.

  I read somewhere that you lose 3 per cent of your brain volume while pregnant. When I asked my obstetrician about this, she laughed and said, ‘You never get it back.’ Ho, ho, ho.

  I know women who do amazing things while pregnant. I was not one of them.

  Here is something you do need to know. There is such a thing as antenatal depression, which is to say depression before rather than after the birth. This depression hits in the first trimester of pregnancy when progesterone levels are high, and it predisposes the mother to the ravages of postnatal depression. Women who suffer from PMT, who have a depressive reaction to the pill, or who evidenced a mood disorder at the onset of puberty are particularly vulnerable. And: ‘10 to 15 per cent of all pregnant women experience what is called antenatal depression, oftentimes severe, sometimes psychotic.’

  What I want to know is, how can they tell?

  Because the symptoms of pregnancy are, many of them, the same as the symptoms of depression, especially in the first trimester when all you want to do is lie on the sofa. The second time I conceived I went straight to the sofa shop; I said, I am going to spend this pregnancy on a nice sofa. Then whoosh, it hit before I could get the credit card out. What is the difference between linen and cotton, between brown and blue? What is the difference between my life now and any other life I might have led? What about leather? Oh, dear, I think I’d better go home and have a little lie-down.

  Never mind. Oxytocin, they say – the love hormone, the one that pushes you into labour, the hormone you get while breast-feeding and when you fall in love and also, as a little bonus, during orgasm – this, the world’s favourite hormone, also makes you more intelligent. Don’t ask me where I read that.

  But I do know where I read about the rats – it was on the BBC news website. Female rats that have given birth do significantly better in memory tests than other female rats. Even foster-mother rats performed better than other rodents. That’s what we want to hear. ‘The mental stimulation of caring for newly born offspring effectively rewires nerve cells and boosts brain power . . . The researchers believe “rich sensory events” generated by caring for young are likely to affect brain structure as well as hormones. The stimulation that comes from suckling in particular probably reorganises connections in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus.’

  So it is partly a question of multitasking (changing a nappy while talking on the phone to the Minister of Foreign Affairs), which women were always supposed to be good at, anyway, just as men were supposed to be good at reading maps, and partly something else. Suckling, apparently.

  My hypothalamus must be as big as an egg by now. As big as a ping-pong ball. What does your hypothalamus do? I wish they knew.

  My mother reared mean multitaskers, both female and male. I was quite good at it, myself, until I had babies. For those first months I am only so so. The most I can manage is a little typing while I breast-feed, and even that is a dreamy, misspelt affair. Otherwise, when I walk down the street I think about the street, when I look at the baby I think about the baby. It is a wordless sort of thinking, mostly, a kind of sea, on which nouns like ‘nappy’, or ‘wind’, occasionally drift and bob. ‘Whose eyebrows are they anyway?’ I say to myself. And, ‘Hello!’ I say to the baby, ‘Hello,’ as though we had not met for days.

  I wonder, quite often, why they won’t a
ll leave us alone. Also why they won’t leave the poor rats alone. I wish they would stop feeding rats things in order to give their baby rats two tails or manic depression or poor impulse control. The womb police, I call them. Who are they talking to anyway? They should be petitioning the government over pesticide controls, because there are children born among the wheat fields who have no eyes. They should stand in the hospital outpatients and shout, ‘STOP-BEING-POOR!’ because poverty is what damages the developing foetus more than anything else. But no, they keep on preaching to the converted, and now that we are all eating our lamb’s lettuce and getting our folic acid, they have honed in on those most prevalent of middle-class vices, a cup of coffee and the occasional glass of Chardonnay.

  A team in Queens University Belfast discovered that, on one drink per day, foetal response to an external noise at twenty-two weeks was delayed by another week, or more. At the University of Mexico they fed pregnant rats with a 2 per cent, 3 per cent or 5 per cent alcohol liquid diet throughout gestation and found that ‘even low to moderate levels of drinking during pregnancy cause long-lasting alterations in synaptic plasticity and spatial learning’. I don’t call being 2 per cent pissed all day, every day, a low level of drinking, but what do I know? I also think that one drink a day, every day, is very hard going when you are pregnant, even if you are from Northern Ireland, but I suppose they got the women to hold their noses and down it in one. Still, it’s not as hard going as the eight cups of coffee per day that a Danish study showed increases the chances of stillbirth by 220 per cent. Eight cups? Who lives like that? Well, lots of people, probably. The world is full of small addictions and necessities. One per cent of women take painkillers every single day, thereby doubling the risk of ‘wheeze’ in their children. And if you eat too much peanut butter, you will give them an allergy so severe they go into anaphylactic shock.